I am designing magazine pages for the iPad. What I want to have happen is to click one visible button, and that makes another button appear. To close the button that just popped up, I want to tap on the new button, then it would disappear again.

What I did was create two buttons. The first button would be visible, and the other button should not be visible. However, even though I selected "Hidden Until Triggered" on the second button, it still was visible at the start when I previewed it in the Overlay Creator and on the iPad.

How can I hide the second button to begin with? What's the best way to achieve the effect of making one button appear by pressing another, then closing it again by pressing itself?

I too found out the hard way that "Hidden Until Triggered" does not work with DPS. Since this is a pretty huge thing we need for our publication, I hope Adobe is working on getting this to be available for DPS. To have that and the "Show/Hide Buttons" action available for buttons is pretty crucial for us!!

OK, based on some other blog posts and such, I tried something else out. I grouped each invisible button (my "hotspot") with its image, and then selected all the images grouped with their buttons and created a multi state object out of all of them. I set each hotspot in each state to go to the next state in the MSO.

This works in the Preview pane, but again, NOT in the Overlay creator Preview, and not on the iPad either. Nothing is clickable.

Am I missing something, should that be working, or is this just not going to be possible right now with the way the tools export to DPS?

In order for a button contained within an MSO state to change that MSOs current state, there must be a corresponding button OUTSIDE the MSO. The outside button can be shoved into a corner and sized down to 1x1 so as not to get in the way.

Also, if you create a button outside an MSO, and assign an action to it that changes the MSO's state, you will lose that action when you place the button inside a state of that MSO. Assign the action AFTER placing the button within the MSO.

I guess I don't understand what you mean by "must be a corresponding button outside the MSO." Can you be more precise?

I'm new-ish to the interactivity of InDesign.

Looking at the link above from Bob for the hotspot button workaround, would those second, invisible buttons disappear when they are not supposed to be "in use"?

Let's say I have four screenshots layered on top of one another, and I want to cycle through them to show the user how to create a new InDesign document. The first screen is of when InDesign first opens and has no document open. The second screen is of the menu open with the pullout for New Document. The next screenshot shows the New Document dialog box open. The last one shows the new document open.

I'd want to create hotspots for where to click in each step, and show the next screenshot. This is to "simulate" practicing a task in the software from within the ebook.

This means that each time the next screenshot comes up, I don't want the old hotspots still active, beause if the user accidently clicks the previous hotspot, the simulation will be out of sequence...

Does this make sense? Sorry, it's hard to explain all this in text.

Believe you me, I am cursing the hell out of Apple iOS's intransience about Flash, as this would be DONE AND OVER with by now if it weren't for that stupid fact. The beautiful things I could produce with Captivate for my ebook, for example, if I could just embed an SWF...GRRRR. With this new job making me work on a Mac and with iPads, I have only begun hating Apple way more than I already did.

Arg, I take it back, I DID get it working at the last minute end of the week last week. I had a really awful long weekend which involved the running away of our new adopted doggie, so I am a little kufuffled right now.

Anyway, the ONLY thing I need help on - since I got the rest of my sim working with buttons inside of MSO states and they only show when the state shows, is that my initial "start Simulation" button which starts the MSO off, won't hide itself, but sticks around on TOP of the MSO, when I want it to disappear...

What you're trying to do is possible. There is an example of it in the Advanced Overlays issue of the DPS Tips app. Each slide in the MSO has its own set of buttons that are available only when that slide is visible. The quirky issue is that these nested buttons alone don't "activate" the MSO to turn it into a slideshow. If you don't select an option such as Tap to Play or Swipe, you need to create an invisible dummy button outside the MSO that has a state action. The other odd thing is that when you paste your buttons into the MSO, they lose their action, and you need to select them again and re-apply the action.

Yup I got that working (see previous Arg post) but now I just need to figure out a way to make the "Start Sim" initial button disappear or hide...is there an easy way to do this? Especially if I want the MSO to be fullscreen'd...I don't want the intial button hanging around being clickable...Invisible or not invisible.

If you use a button outside the MSO, the button will always be active. One possibility is to create a non-interactive poster that sits on top of the MSO, and the select Hidden Until Activated and Tap to Play for the MSO on the Overlays panel. The MSO will then start playing, so you would want to set a long duration. Experiment with those settings.

You're not being dense. It's difficult to give advice because I can't see your design. The easiest approach is to not use a button at all, if that works. Add a button to the first slide of your MSO so that tapping it goes to the next slide and starts the demo. If that doesn't work -- if you need to tap something that goes away -- then you can try the non-interactive poster trick. It doesn't need to be on a separate layer. Just add it on top of the MSO. Experiment with the size of the poster and the settings (Hide Before Playing and Tap to Play/Pause with duration of 60) until you get the effect you're looking for.

After attending a recent Adobe Create event, I was REALLY fired up by the possibilities offered by Adobe for iPad publications. However, after several days 'trying to get things to work', I'm pretty frustrated! Most of the interactive functions we got to grips with in InDesign are simply not intuitive on iPad. I too was looking at this button issue - on this, and many other topics, all I read about are 'workarounds'. There seems to be no intuitive quick methodology in iPad design - any higher-than-basic interactive design seems to be possible only by workarounds. Very frustrating, and my productivity is falling through the floor. Come on Adobe, is MUST be easier than this!